Real Scottish Fiction

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The crisp onions were making a great crackling,
and on a cold night the smell was enough to
draw water out of dead teeth.

If you decided to write a romance, chances are you’d put your muscular man and breathless heroine in the highlands of Scotland.  Don’t do it.  There’s a flood of fake Scottish mumbo-jumbo on the market.  Ditto for historical fiction. 

Here’s a better idea.  Read some authentic Scottish fiction, written by a Scot.  You cannot improve on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped; I am especially fond of John Buchan and his sister Anna, who wrote under the pen name O. Douglas. 

The mother passed the cups of tea.
She had the natural air of
dispensing life’s mercies.

If you are sweet on Stevenson, if you love Buchan, Neil Gunn (1891-1973)  is another Scottish author worth a look.  Rick Steves, the travel guru, mentioned him in a guidebook.  Gunn is called “the most important Scottish novelist of the 20th century.”

Morning Tide, a coming-of-age story set in an impoverished fishing village takes you to the shore of the sullen, relentless sea and into the cottage of the MacBeth family. 

She could get up and lift a boiling kettle from the fire
while her husband was saying grace
without destroying the moment’s harmony,
as if wisdom dwelt also in her movements.

Life is harsh, difficult, but not without comfort of onions and the pleasure of practical jokes.  Twelve-year-old Hugh MacBeth is always hungry, often running, impatient with school, and coming to grips with the reality of a harsh life. 

He [the schoolmaster] was clever,
there was no doubt of that.
And he could speak seven languages.
Seven.  Ay, ay.
The old men nodded their heads.
Learning was a great thing.
They looked far beyond one another.
A great thing, learning.
A far and wonderful thing.
There was no denying that.
It was a strange thing, too.
Its strangeness excited them a little,
and its wonder.
Love of learning was in their marrow.

Gunn writes about the survival of the folk living in the fishing village.  The men leave in boats; the women wonder if they will make it back home.  Breakfast is always porridge; dinner is a question mark.  They stare death in the eye daily and yet clearly see the sweetness of life.  More Gunn here.  Particularly recommended to mothers (and fathers) of boys.

Why I Love My Sons’ Father

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I’ve mentioned before my husband’s excellence at note writing and his blessings.  Never sappy, never sentimental, sometimes funny, but always thoroughly wonderful.  While I was helping my son cook his own birthday dinner (Bolognese sauce, pasta, focaccia and green salad) Curt sat down and wrote a card.  With permission from both the giver and the recipient, here it is:

Your birthday is always a good day to take some time
   and reflect back over the years.
Remember the blunders and the blessings,
   the sins and obediences, the consequences and mercies.
In all of it, I pray you will see God’s gracious hand and relentless patience.
May you learn to be always thankful and forever fearful.
Actually, the order must go the other way.
Fear God, for He does as He pleases with you.
And thank Him, for He is pleased to do good to you.
Master these two attitudes toward God, and no other idol will master you.
I am privileged to be your father, and I am proud to have you as my son.

Always,

Dad

Our First Dance Date

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The rain was cascading in solid 500-thread-count sheets.  We scurried across the street and fumbled with the door knob, scooting into a little country church surrounded by a residential neighborhood.  A tiny antechamber led into an open room with 15-foot ceilings.  The empty wooden floor was waiting; ancient faded quilts hanging between tall, narrow windows wrapped the space.  Chilly, I left my jacket on.  

We didn’t know what to expect, except that we came to dance.  After watching the grace of two couples swing-dancing at a wedding reception, I suggested dancing classes to my husband.  This is an idea we have never once entertained in 32 years together.  Curt investigated the “dance class” scene in our small town, got the scoop and surprised me with a date to learn English country dance.  

Not exactly a class, it was a cross-generation gathering of folks who simply like to dance on Tuesday evenings.  Whole families showed up from little ones on up to Grandmas. Most folks wore casual jeans; some girls wore skirts. No breeches or empire waists.  Eyes bright with a patina of good cheer welcomed us.

The first thing our teacher did was split us up –with apologies–and paired us with experienced dancers.  We made our hands dance, tapping on our thighs to grasp the rhythm.  The feet followed as we learned sides, back to back, circular hey, a few more steps and suddenly we were doing the dances you see in Jane Austen movies.  With the music!  It wasn’t weird; it was fun. 


It turns out Tuesday Evening Folk Dancing rotates Irish Set, International/Balkan, New England Contra and English Country dancing.  Thoughts:

•  Tempo changes things.  We did the same dance to the same music but one CD was very jiggish and the other CD was joggish, if you understand joggish to mean slow and deliberate.   I thought the slower one was more intense, with potential for undercurrent. When you are jigging you don’t have time to wink at your beloved in passing.

•  Eye contact: Ay-Yi-Yi!  Our teacher emphasized how important eye contact was in English country dance.  Whew!  There is something intimidating about holding eye contact, because, I think, eye contact is intimate.  I couldn’t do it. [Remember, I wasn’t dancing with my husband.]  It made me realize how very seldom we sustain eye contact in everyday life.  

•  I never thought of elegant as a masculine adjective.  But there were a few young men–and they weren’t wispy by any means–for whom no other word would be adequate.  I felt my posture improving around them.

•  Being/feeling a fool is good for the soul.  Amidst all our striving for excellence it is a relief to be totally incompetent.  Laughter is a happy detoxification.

•  Ahem.  These folk are not overweight.  I want to hang out with them, learn from them.

•  The Way We Dance    


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Sing Me to Heaven. Setting by Daniel E. Gawthrop. Text by Jane Griner

In my heart’s sequestered chambers lie truths stripped of poets’ gloss
Words alone are vain and vacant, and my heart is mute
In response to aching silence, memory summons half-heard voices
And my soul finds primal eloquence, and wraps me in song

If you would comfort me, sing me a lullaby
If you would win my heart, sing me a love song
If you would mourn me and bring me to God,
sing me a requiem, sing me to Heaven

Touch in me all love and passion, pain and sorrow
Touch in me grief and comfort, love and passion, pain and pleasure
Sing me a lullaby, a love song, a requiem
Love me, comfort me, bring me to God
Sing me a love song, sing me to Heaven

(Thank you, Brenda.)

To Be the Provider, the Giver

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Collin, this morning, after a solo turkey hunt

Sometimes my reading life and my living life perfectly coincide.  At lunch I was browsing through Neil Gunn’s novel, Morning Tide.  I’m quite sure you have heard neither of Neil Gunn nor this title.  However, if you lived in Scotland, Gunn would be a familiar author.  In this-coming-of age tale, twelve-year old Hugh MacBeth is reckoning how he can help the family while his father is away fishing and his mother is ill.  I can say with certainty that my sons have all experienced a moment like this.  

But if he got this fish now and Bill and himself set rabbit-snares tonight, it might be something. A great desire came upon him to provide for the house.  To hunt and kill, to bring food home, and fire.  His eyes glistened, but in their light there was also something of awe.  Life could hold nothing more supreme than that.  To be the provider, the giver.  The importance of it made him quiver.  He saw in a flash deep into man’s estate.  The glory, the power, and the self-restraint that smiles thanks shyly away.  To be able to do that…and then for his father to come home, to learn about it, and–to look at him for a moment with his quiet man’s look.  Nothing on earth could beat that.

Wedding Journal

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I love a good wedding.  Our dear Jackie married Zack; it was a day of soaring highlights, re-connections and robust celebration .  Zack and Jackie, ahem!, met in my Shurley Grammar class.  They spent another year with me studying Shakespeare.  Here is a journal of my reflections.

::  The attendants were all related to the bride and groom.  There were more guys than gals, so the procession included the seating of the mothers and grandmothers.  It was wonderful to have all the close family included in the official beginning of the wedding.

::   You know music is important to me.  The entire family/wedding party came down the aisle to Non Nobis Domine (Not to us, O Lord, but to Your Name give the glory) from Henry V. If you listen to the link, the bride made her entrance around 2:35 where the orchestral fanfare builds.  I watched–through a cataract of tears–my people (son, daughter-in-law, grandsons, dear friends) process past me.  I will never listen to Non Nobis again without thinking of a radiant bride smiling at the man she loves.

::  Black Chocolate Wranglers.  There are benefits to marrying a cowboy.

::   It was a large wedding, ~ 500 guests.  The bride’s family emptied their barn and made it suitable for a celebration.  (look at the picture below…coming out of my husband’s ear is a chandelier made out of wagon wheels) Family and friends pitched in to set up, decorate, cook food, iron tablecloths, pull weeds, serge fabric, and park cars.  It was such a joy to be able to help a family who are normally the helpers. 

 


Papa (Curt) and Preston

::  My role in this wedding was to bribe our exhausted grandson to be quiet with M & Ms.  My husband coached my attempts in a whisper.  Not so fast!  Give him another one.  Wait a little longer.  See if he wants water.  He’s going to throw up, he’s had so many.  After we got him in a sugar coma, he fell asleep on Papa’s shoulder in two seconds.  Yay!  We achieved our goal.

::  Generational blessing.  Every decade in life was represented in the room full of guests.  Grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles: extended family were abundant.  Babies, babies everywhere!  There were easily thirty pregnant moms and fifty babes in arms.  Have I said what a blessing it is to be part of a community that loves and values children?

People and realms of every tongue
dwell on his love with sweetest song;
and infant voices shall proclaim
their early blessings on his name.

::   I glanced to the back and saw Carson, Johann, and Jamie standing–bouncing, rocking–with babes in arms and Leah next to them standing with her arms resting on her pregnant belly.  All these kids were in my classes.  They spent endless hours playing flashlight tag, snowboarding, eating pizza and talking about life.  Now they live hundreds of miles apart.  A sob of gratitude bubbled up.  Look at them! 

::   My son’s toast to the bride and groom, paraphrased:  “Let’s go back twelve years to my mom’s grammar class. That was when you and me met Jackie and Jessie (you and I, I correct him from the audience…500 people roar).  You didn’t care much about Shakespeare, but taking my mom’s class meant more time around Jackie the following year.  After that you both went in different directions, but eventually two couples got married from that class.  So Mom, you thought you were teaching us Shakespeare, but in fact you were doing premarital counseling! …

Russia by Car, Congo by Canoe

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[Reading these books is a part of my plan to read around the world.]

Where Nights Are Longest: Travels by Car Through Western Russia by Colin Thubron (re-issued as Among the Russians) will likely be more interesting in about twenty years.  A travel memoir written in 1983 before the dissolution of the Soviet Union seems dated now, but its historic value will endure.  

The road lifted and fell in great calm sighs, flowing between fields of maize and birch forest.  Here and there a line of willows traced the idling of a river…

My goal in my reading plan was to read and release, to clear off my bookshelves.  I didn’t account for Thubron’s elegant prose and cogent commentary. Alas, I must keep this book, if only to pick it up and feed on the phrases later. 

Three things I liked:  1) I saw the essential religious nature of life.  In the former Soviet Union the Soviet State presides in the place of God.  Thubron’s continual framing of the secular culture in religious terms fascinated me.

Small wonder that the usurping creed had to mimic them [pre-revolutionary churches].  All through Stalin’s reign public buildings subconsciously strained for religious effect, and frogmarched into service half the paraphernalia of classical paganism.    


Birth, marriage, death–there is no state ritual which can invest such moments with the same perspective as the Church does.  Secular funerals are desultory affairs, and state-run weddings ring hollow: not because God is not there–that cannot be helped–but because a spurious effort is made to keep the trappings of religiosity where the promises of religion don’t apply.  

2) The snapshots of quotidian life and the average Russian/Armenian/Estonian/Georgian citizen.  Thubron, a solitary traveler, has a talent for engaging folk in extended conversation.  He drank volumes of vodka–it seems to be a prerequisite to talk–but one gets an idea of how the common man perceived his life. 

3) I have a latent love of Russian literature.  I’ve read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Chekhov and Solzhenitsyn…but they are a fading memory.  Thubron goes on a pilgrimage to homes, graves, and villages, visits with Pasternak’s daughter, takes in Tolstoy’s home, Turgenev’s estate.  After reading those chapters, I wanted to clear my schedule and immerse myself in those thick books full of patronymic confusion and clear thinking.     

My favorite quote is about the tension between the laws of hospitality and the laws of conscience:

His hand groped for a glass and I guessed that he was about to propose a toast to Stalin.  I think I turned white.  I made no move.  I imagined the evening’s camaraderie plummeting into wounded national pride and breached hospitality.  Yet no, I could not toast Stalin.

~        ~        ~

Facing the Congo: A Modern-Day Journey into the Heart of Darkness is, perhaps, a photo-negative of the book Endurance.  In it, men take on daring risks…and why? Because places are awaiting exploration. One story is set on the Congo River on the Equator, the other at the South Pole.  Both books speak of journeys taken with the knowledge that the final outcome may be death.

Jeffrey Taylor’s adventure is 90% existential self-actualization, a proving to himself of his own worth. Though he faces extreme physical hardship, especially suffocating heat, his greatest peril comes from traveling in Zaire, an unstable country made violent by the policies of the dictator, Mobutu. 

There is no evening on the equator. The sun falls promptly at six and rises at six: every equatorial night is the obverse in time of every equatorial day, a coin flipping now light, now dark, with a band of fifteen minutes of resplendent dawn or lustrous dark in between.

Taylor’s prose is graceful, but his perceptions often fall flat.  His descriptions of poverty are persuasive, his sketches of the Africans he meets fill your mind. There were sections of the river–cannibal territory–so dramatic, I had to read while I blew-dry my hair.  The tension dissolves into an empty ending with precious few lessons to take home. 

This book makes me want to read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, one of those classics which escaped my high school lit classes.  Thubron’s book makes me want to read all his travel books.

    

A Near Miss

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To the company that deducted money from my bank account with the helpful description BILLPAYING: Thank you.  Because if it weren’t for the delay unraveling that sweet bowl of spaghetti, I wouldn’t have heard a distant bank teller ask, “What’s this book sale where you buy books for a dollar an inch?” 

Excuse me?  How did one of the High Holy Days–the opening hours of the book sale–so quickly become Passover?  When did I get so busy that I missed the first sixteen hours of the annual university book sale? 

Glumly, I considered not going.  Surely all the good stuff was gone and I would have to root around in Judy Blume and Danielle Steel looking for a morsel.  But lo! I remembered that my literary tastes are so far out of the mainstream that they are completely dry.  Perhaps there were some unplucked treasures waiting for me.

Here, my friend, are my top five finds, books I snatched up as I breathed a prayer of thanksgiving.

Ever since watching Wit, I have wanted to get this book.
No man is an island…in this book.
Prayers, meditations, expostulations…in this book.
A sermon on the verse: And unto God the Lord belong the issues of death,
said to be Donne’s own funeral oration…in this book.

The Church Hymnal (1892) Episcopal
679 hymns + 211 canticles and Amens!!
I will spend hours at the piano, mining for gold.

The New Oxford Book of Christian Verse
Withdrawn from library with
completely blank Date Due sticker in back!
Poems from William Langland to Wendell Berry.

This book looks like gangs of fun.

The subtitle explains why I couldn’t resist.
Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany

Well, well, well.
I can’t wipe the grin off my face.

…happy, contented sigh…

The Disappearance of Childhood

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Children are the living messages we send
to a time we will not see.

Since reading Amusing Ourselves to Death, I’m a sucker for anything Neil Postman writes.  His books are provocative, engaging and challenging.  While Postman chronicles many technological advances and their effects on children, he focuses on television, especially contrasted with reading as a source of information. 

We may conclude, then, that television erodes the
dividing line between childhood and adulthood in
three ways: first, because it requires no instruction
to grasp its form; second, because it does not make
complex demands on either mind or behavior; and
third, because it does not segregate its audience.

What Postman prophesied in 1982 has come to pass; the fundamental tenets apply to a culture of texting, tweeting and Facebook updates.   He says we have adultified children (in dress, entertainment, food, clothing and language) and childified adults (in same areas).

Postman paints a bleak picture.  What he suggests is to limit media’s access to children (not the other way around, hmmm) both by limiting exposure and content and by always critiquing what you watch/hear with your children.

But America has not yet begun to think.
The shock of twentienth-century technology
numbed our brains and we are just beginning
to notice the spiritual and social debris that our
technology has strewn about us.

From this book, I gleaned one of my all-time favorite quotes:

Watching television not only requires no skills,
but develops no skills.
As Damerall points out,
“No child or adult becomes better at
watching television by doing more of it.
What skills are required are so elemental
that we have yet to hear
of a television viewing disability.”

Since I read this book, I’ve noticed other people noticing the loss of childhood: this New York Times op-ed piece, this tabloid cover I saw at the grocery store.

While it is easy to cluck-cluck at this sort of thing, what is required is major resistance to our culture.

Resistance entails conceiving of parenting as an act of rebellion
against American culture…To insist that one’s children learn the
discipline of delayed gratification, or modesty in their sexuality,
or self-restraint in manners, language and style is to place
oneself in opposition to almost every social trend.

The Disappearance of Childhood.  Highly recommended.